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I've been using WordPress for about 3 years and after taking advantage of all the great stuff available I decided it was time to give back. These themes are my contribution to the WordPress community. Thanks for stopping by! :D

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Surreal Reality Theme

My third theme, Surreal Reality. This one is a 4 column split-sidebar, widget-ready theme in soothing Cream and Green colors. There are 2 sidebars on the left and 1 on the right. My first attempt at fluid width that holds the layout down to 800px. Features an author box, author info page, gravatars and highlighted author comments in the comments section along with custom Archives, Sitemap and full width No Sidebars page templates. Tested in Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE6 and IE7. And as with all my themes it’s valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 out of the box.

About Mina

I'm just a regular person who spends her days at work on the computer and comes home and spends her evenings on the computer. I've been using WordPress for over 3 years and after enjoying all the WP community has to offer I've decided it's time for me to give back. This is my humble attempt at that.

Hey, glad you like it! Are you saying you want to add a graphic in your header? To do that just ftp your image (right now the size is 800 x 150 but you can change that) to the theme’s image folder and add some code to the stylesheet.

In style.css find:

“#header” and in that section look for “background: #bcbc9a;” and change that to “background: #bcbc9a url(images/yourheaderimage.jpg);” To change the height just find “height: 150px;” (in the same section of code) and change the 150px to whatever your image is.

I hope that helps, if not let me know some more details and we’ll get it straightened out.

Okay first off I need to apologize, I said earlier that the banner size was 800 x 150, but that was a bit misleading. There actually is no set width for this theme. I guess I shouldn’t do these things so early in the morning. But with that said, we can still address the issue.

Thank you sooo much. It looks great now. Can I just ask…do you know what’s the real banner size of your header? I might just go back to photoshop and maybe edit the size for it. I actually like the background color you used, so I might still use that and maybe put a layer banner on top of it.

Anyways…thank you! I might just experiment with it later and see if I can learn css more. ^^

As for a banner size, there really isn’t one. This is a fluid theme so it sort of depends on a person’s screen resolution. If you make it too big and someone has their monitor set at a low resolution it will mess up. That’s why 800px is good because that’s usually the lowest you can set your monitor.

That’s just a general rule, you can technically make it any size you’d like. I know…it’s weird! But if I can help you with anything else, please let me know.

I’m not sure there is a set answer to your question. The only things I could suggest would be to play around with text and background colors to find the right combination. Also possibly increasing the font size would help.

Thanks, glad you like it. As for the ads, I’m not really a big ads person so forgive my ignorance on this subject. I guess I’m not sure what you plan on doing? Would it be Google ads or possibly a widget? If you give me a little more information I’m sure we can work it out.

We promise to not spoil your elegant theme . But adds are sometimes necessary , unfortunately .
And we would want to use those free spaces in the header .
It’s about Google AdSense, indeed ( but others too ), which come under a HTML code format .
Text widgets – positioned on the left and right side of the title – would be a great solution … With adjustable dimensions ( are we asking too much ?! )

Meanwhile we have another problem with your theme’s “Pages toolbar” .
It shows all published pages , but we would want to select some of them ( because we have too many ). The normal WP Pages widget allows that , but in Sureal Reality’s case there is a built-in one . Nevertheless this shouldn’t be complicate .

It’s not that I’m concerned about whether or not you “spoil” my theme. I realize that sometimes ads are necessary it’s just that I’ve never used them so I have no experience with them. You can do pretty much whatever you want with the theme once you download it.

First I’ll address the Pages issue. You have 2 choices…either use the wordpress widget or go into the left_sidebar.php and find this line:

<?php wp_list_pages(‘depth=3&title_li=Pages’); >

and change it to:

<?php wp_list_pages(‘depth=3&title_li=Pages&exclude=X,X,X’); ?>

“X” would be the page id’s of the pages you don’t want to show in the sidebar. To exclude pages from showing in the horizontal navigation bar use the exclude parameter again in menu.php.

Now about the ads…keeping in mind that I am basically a average WordPress user who’s learning as she goes, this is what I’ve come up with.

I find this theme to be really really great. It doesn’t burn the eyes with bright or dark or mixed colors, it isn’t blurry and difficult to read. And to make it better, it has this cozy feeling.
Overall great, and I am proud to be able to use it on my site ^^

I’m coming back with a big delay ( sorry ! bussy period ) .
In fact it was only today that I’ve finally checked your solution to exclude unwanted pages from the horizontal navigationr bar .
It didn’t work out for me . But I might have done mistakes somewhere ( I wanted to exclude no less than 25 pages ! )

Anyway it would have been a bit illogical to apply this solution, taking into consideration that I publish more and more pages … And this would have required reediting menu.php over and over .
It is much better to state/choose what are the Pages to be kept ( like the WP Pages widget does ), isn’t it ?

Now I would like to change Pages in the horizontal navigation bar with Categories , because I have only 5 ( stable ) categories and my site is somehow category-oriented .
Is it possible ? Would you be so kind and tell me how ?

Unfortunately your code isn’t showing here in the post but if it’s working the way you want then yeah, you are good to go.

About the pages thing, you’re right. If you have more pages to exclude than you want to show then the way I originally told you. It looks like you might have already worked it out though but in case you haven’t in order in include pages in menu.php instead of exclude then then just change ‘exclude’ to ‘include’ and add the pages you want to show.

I just got through looking at a post on updating themes for 2.7. The author doesn’t know how to explain things for goobers like me. You know, start with the basic layout of the file in question, show what needs to be changed, and how to change it. The result? I’m quite at sea.

So I’m commenting here to encourage you to update Sureal-Reality for 2.7. Think of it as coding practice.

My current plans are to use S-R for Mythusmage, which will act as my portal to my blogs. So why use WordPress as a CMS? Because it isn’t as fussy or confusing as “real” CMSes. It’s more intuitive.

Wow, that was a fast reaction. I went back to say that suddenly everything was right again and saw you already reacted. I was hours busy trying to get the sidebar up again, and finally thought I might ask you.

Thank you very much for your reaction, but I am so very happy it did get right again, even if I have no idea how that was possible

Hi, firstly I want to say I love the theme and use it on two blogs. I am having a bit of trouble. I am trying to put an image in the background of the header but it keeps repeating.The main image to the left then a part of the same image appears to the right.

Do you have any advice or the code I could use. Sorry to take up your time, any help would be appreciated.

Good morning Mina!
This past month I have put up WordPress and love Surreal Reality! I’ve made a number of changes and added in plugins. However, I’m having 2 issues that I thought you might have an idea about.
1. I can’t get the comments to work. (I change to the generic template and it’s ok.)
2. How do I get multiple posts to show? Unless I’m in admin, I can’t see old posts.
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
-tine

2. They should be showing…Go into Admin >> Settings >> Reading and see what is says for “Blog pages show at most“. It might only be set to 1, change that to however many posts you want on a page and save.